Thought Leadership
Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot Claude can now search the web – a capability it lacked for a long time. This new function puts the system on a par with competing products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
The web search is now available as a preview version for paying Claude users in the USA, as Anthropic announced in its blog. Support for free users and other countries will follow shortly. Users can activate web search in their profile settings via the Claude web app, whereupon Claude automatically searches various websites to back up certain answers.
However, the web search currently only works with the latest Anthropic model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, according to the company.
“When Claude incorporates information from the web into its answers, it provides direct source citations so you can easily verify the sources,” the company writes in its blog post. “Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format. This enhancement adds real-time insights to Claude’s extensive knowledge base and provides answers based on more up-to-date information.”
Anthropic highlights various areas of application for the new function:
- Sales teams can improve their customer conversations by using current industry trends to identify key initiatives and pain points
- Financial analysts can analyze current market data, earnings reports and industry trends to make better investment decisions
- Researchers can create stronger grant applications and literature reviews by searching primary sources on the web and identifying research gaps
- Consumers can compare product features, prices and reviews from different sources to make informed purchasing decisions
According to initial tests (via TechCrunch), the web search function is not yet consistently triggered for questions about current events. However, when activated, Claude does indeed provide an answer with sources in the text, referencing various sources including social media (e.g. X) and news sources such as NPR and Reuters.
With this update, Anthropic is clearly responding to market pressure. ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have been offering comparable functions for some time now. The previous argument that Claude was deliberately designed as a “self-contained system” has apparently been abandoned.
